Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Stockman’s March to Social Madness

By James W. Russell (first published on Perfect Swindle blog, 4/24/2011)

David A. Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s Director of Management and Budget, came right out and said it in an April 24, 2011 New York Times op-ed, “The Bipartisan March to Fiscal Madness” Social Security should be reduced to a means tested program that would benefit only the poor.

Instead of being the primary source of middle and working class retirement income, it would become a welfare program.

At a time when 401(k) type retirement plans have been exposed for not being able to provide anywhere near the retirement security that the traditional pensions that they replaced provided for working and middle class retirees who are now more dependent than ever on Social Security, removing that source of retirement income from ordinary people would be a road to social madness.

Stockman’s advocacy is consistent with the World Bank’s 1994 Averting the Old Age Crisis report that led to widespread disastrous privatization of national retirement systems in Latin America.

What neither he nor the Times disclosed is that since leaving the Reagan administration, he has become very rich through positions in the financial services industry, including in Salomon Brothers, the Blackstone Group, and his own company, Heartland Industrial Partners. That industry stands to profit handsomely from all diversions of current retirement savings from Social Security to its own 401(k) like plans.

And, of course, Stockman has become so rich from the financial services industry that he has no personal need for Social Security benefits during his own retirement.

James W. Russell is CSU Professor of Sociology at Eastern Connecticut State University and the author of Double Standard: Social Policy in Europe and the United States: second edition.

Detours on the Way to a Classless Society

By Rudolph H. Weingartner

For many right-thinking people—that is to say, liberals—equal pay for equal work has always been a goal to be achieved. While this aspiration pertained particularly to women, who once were very far from getting the same compensation as men and have yet to reach parity, it applied, as well, to discrimination that is based on race, religion, national origin, disability or age. The objective of reaching equality is an expression of a piece of American ideology that wants us to stand out as a classless society or at least to come closer than Old Europe, not to mention the lands of the Middle East. And since we are talking about economic criteria, this goal has a genuine resemblance to Karl Marx’s notion of a classless society, though it would be best to keep quiet about that, since it might scare off potential friends of the cause.

Progress is being made. Last January, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act. The law makes it easier to sue a company for pay discrimination and in that way discourages such bias in the first place. In another part of the forest, however, there is backsliding. I shall be pointing to practices, moreover, that cannot be alleviated by Congressional bills, signed by the Chief Executive. In the second edition of my Fitting Form to Function: A Primer on the Organization of Academic Institutions [Rowman & Littlefield, 2011], I give a brief deploring account of the vast increase of the use of adjuncts, part timers, and full time lecturers to teach students that the professoriate used to teach. These non-regulars, can never attain the stability of employment that tenured faculty enjoy nor are they remotely compensated at the same level as the so-called “regular” faculty.

You might say the work they do is not equal to that of the (proportionately) shrinking regular faculty and, indeed, for some of the regulars this would indeed be true. But many others, with a small number of courses to teach, engaged in research that is trivial that seldom brings beads of sweat to their brows. On the other hand, the teaching load of the irregulars is large, calling for multiple preparations and the ministering to—that is testing, grading, advising—myriads of students and poorly paid. Two classes of faculty: one markedly more favored than the other.

And now this insidious two-class system is infecting the world of lawyers. An account in The New York Times of May 24, 2011, “At Well-Paying Law Firms, a Low-Paid Corner” describes an expanding practice very similar to the one that has taken hold of the world of post-secondary education. Besides hiring attorneys who stand a chance of becoming partners of the firm (and are generously paid, accordingly), other “fullfledged,” competent lawyers are being hired, earning “less than half the pay of their counterparts, “doing pretty high-level work — writing briefs, visiting client sites, prepping witnesses for hearings.” Law firms used to be composed of two classes: partners and aspiring partners—a healthy division, like that of tenured professors and those on tenure-track. Healthy, because ability and energy came close to assuring “promotion” from the lower to the higher class.

What we are now seeing both in the world of higher education and in the legal establishment is the creation of inferior and superior classes with as much chance of moving upward as in medieval times, a serf had the potential of becoming a knight. Are these signs that we are sliding back into the Middle Ages?

Rudolph H. Weingartner is Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh and the author of Fitting Form to Function: A Primer on the Organization of Academic Institutions: Second Edition.

What Is Going on in Wisconsin?: Scott Walker, Union Busting, and Fighting to Protect Workers' Rights

By Kim Scipes

Tens of thousands of people surrounding the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin for days; Democratic legislators leaving the state and hiding out; unions upset: what is going on in Wisconsin?

Wisconsin has a budget crisis, and the Republican Governor, Scott Walker, wants to make public sector union members pay more for their health care and pension costs. But, much more importantly, Governor Walker also wants to basically gut public sector unions’ collective bargaining rights—and he has the Republican votes in both the Assembly and the Senate to get his way, once he has a quorum.

The problem for Walker is that he has 19 Republicans in the Senate—and needs 20 for a quorum. The Democrats, so far, have refused to give him his quorum, disappearing over the land (and presumably over state borders!). As long as the Senate Democrats stay away, Walker is stymied. Tens of thousands have mobilized around the state to try to convince the governor to change his mind.

The key thing to realize here is that the issue is NOT about the budget—Walker himself helped create much of the $137 million deficit by cutting business taxes $134 million! Strangely enough, raising taxes on corporations to cover state budget deficits is never on the table—Wisconsin’s corporate tax rate hasn’t been raised since 1972.

In what is an obvious, coordinated attack, Republican governors in states including Indiana and Ohio have launched attacks on the collective bargaining rights of unions representing school bus drivers, public health care workers, teachers, etc. This is especially pernicious because both houses of these states’ legislatures are controlled by Republicans. This has been coupled with legislative efforts to pass “Right to Work” laws in a number of other states, which, ostensibly to help workers, in reality only undercut unions.

What we are seeing is a full-powered attempt to weaken unions, and their ability to represent their members. Yes, this is an attack on wages, benefits and working conditions that have been previously negotiated, but more importantly, these attacks are intended to do away with negotiation processes entirely.

There are two reasons for this. The first, as is well known, is that unions usually contribute substantial amounts of monies to Democratic politicians. More importantly, however, is the hours of volunteer labor union members contribute—whether phone banking or going door-to-door for endorsed candidates. Labor still has a strong electoral impact on elections. Destroying these forces can only help the Republicans.

More importantly, however, is the role that unions play in our larger society. While there are a number of problems plaguing the labor movement, the fact remains that unions are the ONLY institutions in US society that even potentially represent the interests and well-being of working people, both in the workplace and the larger society. In fact, their importance is even greater today, as unlimited amounts of political donations make our government “the best money can buy”—and the labor movement is the only institution between plutocracy and (popular) democracy.

Unions oftentimes don’t assert themselves in this position, but when members can motivate them to do so, unions CAN fulfill this important role.

In face of the Governor Walker’s intransigence, the question on the table is what next? Will Walker get his way? Will the unions prevail? Or, in face of Walker’s ideological assault on unions, will union members force their leaders into backing their demands by escalating their actions…. Stay tuned!

Kim Scipes, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University North Central in Westville, IN. A long-time labor activist, he is the author of AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books, 2010).